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Sunday, 17 March 2013

Blog 107: The Unborn Companion

This is an appendix from a larger piece I've been working on for a few days but encompasses the idea simply and quickly. This is from a fiction novelette so far called The Singular Soul which I want to publish through Blurb as I did with the books for my degree show but more in the format of my dissertation, playing with chronology and continuity. Here it is:

A man loved me more than half a century before I was
born. He knew about my life; its highs and lows, they were his escape from his
own tormented life and I've come love him back in my own way via the stories
passed on by the man who helped free him from the confines of an asylum. I was
the unborn companion of Nathaniel Cawdor who saw my life and me through
reflections. He loved me and my life with a passion I could call obsessive a creepy
but to be honest I could have done with a friend like him before now. He worked
around the rules and made the best of a hard life in war torn times.

Each life might be considered a room with a door at
either end. We walk through the first door into the room which might be bigger
or smaller, full or empty and then we exit through the second door to a new
life. This is reincarnation as best I can describe it. Most of us can't
remember the last room. When I leave this room I'll enter the room that is Nathaniel
Cawdor, I can't see his room but he can stare through the keyhole into mine.
Maybe the rooms of our lives aren't in one long line, it seems impractical that
they wouldn't twist back alongside or on top of and under themselves and have
small skylights, windows or a glass floor here and there.

Maybe you’ve experienced the moment where you're feeling
vulnerable and another person who still has to deal with their own problems
offers you a hand to hold or a shoulder to cry on. That's what it feels like when I read
the story of the man who died so young so long before I could have met him. His
hand reached through time to me to offer the comfort he took from my life when
he needed it. I was a friend who could be there for him in solitary confinement
while the screams of the mentally ill and the odour of their waste kept him
awake. That I could help someone in a time like that brings warmth to me, the
pride of hope donation. We could all of our organs away and never have enough
but within us hope springs eternal, why not give?